Waxy.org is the sandbox of Here's the fifth and final episode of The Machine That Changed the World, this one focusing on global information networks including the Internet, and the communication benefits and privacy risks they create. This is the most familiar material of the documentary, so I'm going to skip the notes and annotations this time. I hope you enjoyed the documentary as much as I did.
And, as promised, here's the BitTorrent file for high-resolution copies of all five videos. It's a 3.1GB download with five H.264 encoded MP4 files. (If you only want a single video, use your BitTorrent client to select only the videos you need.) Enjoy!
(Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.)
Interviews:
Robert Lucky (AT&T Bell Labs), Dave Hughes, Kathleen Bonner (Trader, Fidelity), George Hayter (Former Head of Trading, London Stock Exchange), Ben Bagdikian (UC Berkeley), Arthur Miller (Harvard Law School), Forman Brown (songwriter, died in 1996), Tan Chin Nam (Chairman, National Computer Board of Singapore), B.G. Lee (Minister of Trade and Industry, Singapore), Lee Fook Wah, (Assistant Traffic Manager, MRT Singapore), David Assouline (French Activist, now a senator), Mitch Kapor (founder, Lotus), Michael Drennan (Air traffic controller, Dallas-Fort Worth)
4:42 AM
Thank you so much for this. It's been very informative and entertaining to say the least. I found it especially interesting to compare the views and expectations on/about computers from the early 90s to my own experiences of today.
Even growing up in the 80s a computer was pretty exotic and daunting. Rarely something you had any real contact with. I remember my computer-savvy older brother had a C64 which he fiddled around with. But being the younger brother I seldom got an opportunity to do the same.
These days my niece and nephew seem to take things such as internet access and video games completely for granted. Lucky punks! :D
Nice find, and thanks for the effort.
7:16 AM
Torrents rule. What did we do before them?
2:07 PM
Thanks a million for preserving this excellent show.
3:37 PM
Thank you so much for rescuing this amazing documentary.
My son will start college next year and plans to study computer science. This will help him enormously to make up his mind!
2:47 AM
Thank you so much, dude. This Documentary also aired in germany and I still have it on VHS. Great to have it on my blog now too ;)
5:54 AM
Thanks so much for making this available to everyone.
It's amazing to see the speed of progression for the computer and I hope more people get to learn of it's history.
9:09 AM
Thank you for making it available. However the torrent does not work for me... when resolving the tracker, utorrent shows http://waxy.org/bt/tracker.php "hostname not found" error...
5:59 PM
Worked for me, and hundreds of other people on the torrent. I even use uTorrent. Maybe it was a temporary DNS issue? Try it again?
Anyone else having a problem?
10:49 AM
I can't seem to download the torrent file. It just hangs. I tried it yesterday and today.
8:22 PM
A million thanks Andy! Great job!
The torrent worked fine for me, and I'll be seeding it for awhile too.
11:57 PM
anyone else have problems with episode 5 in the torrent? mplayer will play it but quicktime chokes on it... quicktime 7.4.5.
6:57 AM
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!
I have been literally searching for this for YEARS!
The closest I came was finding 3 of the episodes in poor condition at the Los Angeles City Library.
This is a historically significant chronicle of the history of the computer and I am so glad somebody has made this available since the producers: WGBH, BBC have not been interested enough to put this series on DVD and sell it. They could have made a lot of money. Look at the interest in this series that is 17 years old!
Recently I had found that a college professor has posted the episodes on the following URL:
http://www.stewart.cs.sdsu.edu/cs440/lects/TheMachThatChangedTheWorld.html
But the quality is very poor and it is only a low bandwidth stream.
Thanks again.
Fred K
8:36 AM
@rob: Hmm, not sure. I'm using the same version of Quicktime and it works fine for me. Anyone else having that problem?
@Joshua: Are you using Safari? Some people have had issues with .torrent content handling from my server, for some reason... Try downloading the torrent first and opening it in your BitTorrent client directly.
4:25 PM
well, i guess i'll have to take the md5sum of the file on the machine i downloaded it on and on the machine i copied it to.
i'll post the md5 here and you can check it.
i'm still on the torrent so i hope i'm not spreading corrupted data if its bad on my torrent machine...
8:26 PM
i get an md5sum of 269b72b4e84966d6f71ef75fc350dbcc for part 5. i'd be grateful if someone could verify this for me.
9:45 AM
Thank you very much for your efforts, really appreciate it.
Greetings
4:45 AM
absolutely brilliant - just finished watching the last part. i loved the whole series. thanks so much for your hard work.
12:04 AM
I also am having problems with part 5 from the torrent -- iTunes doesn't like that file when I try to add it to my library. Seems to play okay in QT Player though. Any chance of a re-encode of this part, or should I just try redownloading?
Also: thanks for posting all this great documentary content! I love it. And I'm the guy who was thinking about paying $50 for Code Rush too.
10:46 AM
> iTunes doesn't like that file when I try to add it to my library
Part 5 is tagged as a TV show in the metadata , whereas 1-4 are tagged as movies. Do a "Get Info" on each file wherever they may be, go to the "video" tab, change the video type to "movie" or "TV show" as you desire, and the files will all appear in the same section.
5:28 PM
Thank you very much for making this series available for download via torrent, I can't wait to watch it!
12:47 PM
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. I've been looking for this on DVD forever. I think this is one of the best documentaries out there. It's a shame that PBS (or whoever owns it) does not burn it to DVD. With your bit torrent I will do it myself and treasure your gift forever. Thanks again.
3:02 PM
I'm using the BitTorrent client, and it's just hanging with an error message of [4.27.2 2008-07-29 16:57:09] WARNING : Tracker announce still not complete 70 seconds after starting it- going up over 2000 seconds now -
I would really like this series - I'm one of the folks who programmed my VCR to record the series back in 1992-1993 when it played on PBS. Tape finally perished of old age . . .
I would buy this on DVD -- very important historical details on the history of computing that would be valuable to students today -
5:11 PM
I had an absolute blast watching these. Thank you!
12:48 PM
When I was a 12-year old geek, the fact that the robot arm unplugged itself at the end of the outtro used to really bother me, because of Asimov's "robots can't hurt themselves" rule. Nowadays, I think it's being quite eco-friendly.
9:48 AM
Thank You!
For almost all my life online, I have been looking for these documentaries; they shaped most of my early understanding and motivations for becoming a software developer. The moment these come out on DVD I will have them.
Thank you very much for posting this important historical documentary.
:)